


Etudes

by transmarkwatney (felilivargas)



Category: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Genre: Ficlet, M/M, One-Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 16:06:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14814542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/felilivargas/pseuds/transmarkwatney
Summary: Dave learns to love drawing again, thanks to finding new inspiration. His wrist doesn't appreciate it.





	Etudes

As he turned over onto his side, Dave couldn't help but wince at how much his wrist hurt. It felt like a needle was shoving through the cartilage, a vaccination or something of the like in the wrong end of his arm. He inhaled stiffly when he placed weight on his outer wrist as he turned a little in his pod, trying to find a position he was comfortable in. It wasn't good, having wrist trouble when you were a third of a light-hour from contact with a medical professional, but he'd just have to grit his teeth and bear it.

"Dave, are you in pain?"

He couldn't help but to sigh a little at the fatherly voice of the spacecraft AI. "It's nothing to worry about, Hal. I'm sure it'll be gone in the morning."

"Well, alright," Hal said, but his voice fell in a manner that didn't exactly sound sure.

Hal kept quiet for just long enough that Dave thought he was off the hook, but then his deep voice piped up again. "I couldn't help but notice that you'd spent an abnormal amount of time drawing today."

Dave rolled over in his pod (avoiding his right hand). "You caught me, Hal."

"If this becomes a habit, I'm going to have to limit the amount of drawing you do. I'm glad you have hobbies, but they can't detract from your ability to perform your duties as a member of this crew."

"Alright, I'm sorry. It won't happen again. I'll be more careful tomorrow."

That seemed to please him. "Have a good night's rest, Dave," Hal called to him, in his usual calm demeanor. "Hopefully your wrist won't be paining you in the morning."

And with that, the room seemed to glow a little less red, indicating that Hal had left the room to let Dave sleep. Hal wouldn't stop recording, Dave knew, but he appreciated the illusion.

He turned over again, gingerly hoisting himself with the side of his right hand balled into a fist. Hal was right; it wasn't the first time he'd fallen asleep on Discovery with a pained wrist after a long day of drawing. He almost couldn't help it. There wasn't much to do during his off hours, other than converse with Hal or Frank, and half the time Frank was busy working anyways, not to mention that he wasn't much of an extrovert. But he was an artist, though not the best one, at least by his own consideration.

He'd first rediscovered art at Hal's own recommendation. It was during the first few months of the mission, a few days after receiving the gravity assist from Mars. Time between Mission Control and Discovery was stretched, and so was the craft's connection with Earth. He'd found ways of battling boredom, but he had grown bored of them, and even after trying new ways of staying occupied, he got bored of those too. Hal, noticing the change in his demeanor, suggested he use a pad of their paper and pens to draw as a means to relax.

He took to the new task enthusiastically. It had been a long time since he'd last drawn anything--it must have been in college, maybe as far back as when he was working on his master's--and his hands were shaky from inexperience. It was tough, at first, to break into the habit, but in time he found himself relaxing into the paper. It became meditative, even. For once, he could really focus on something that wasn't work. He would sit for minutes and hours trying to make his sketches clearer and more coherent. Slowly, but surely, he regained his artist's eye, seeing the world as a collection of two-dimensional shapes and as solid polyhedra which intersected and moved around each other in space.

Unfortunately he rediscovered the hard way the real problem with art: repetitive wrist motion can get pretty painful. Within a few weeks of rediscovering the freedom of art, he was icing his wrist regularly to keep it from swelling up and hurting whenever he moved it. Hal advised him to draw for only two or three hours a day until the pain went away. And by "advised," he meant "urged Dave after drawing for more than three hours in one day to stop, citing 'the risk of premature onset of carpal tunnel' as the top of his medical concerns, loudly from the nearest place he was installed in the wall." As annoying as it could be when Dave was finishing up a sketch, he eventually settled into the habit of stopping after three hours. It helped to give his eyes a break from looking at the paper, anyways.

But lately, he'd found another reason to draw.

Dave had drawn people recently--most of the time he drew the crew in stasis, though sometimes he drew figures and faces from his own imagination--but he'd somehow overlooked his other active crewmember. There was something almost perfect about Frank's facial structure, he realized. It resided somewhere along the faint line of his cheekbones, and his jawline and his chin. Or maybe it was in his eyebrows, always pitched at a serious angle, even when Frank himself was chuckling at a corny joke or scoffing lightly at something Dave or Hal had said. Or his nose, even, or his carefully clipped hairline (which at times Dave had assisted with, since cutting your hair on your own can be a bit of a hassle). Or maybe it was his dark eyes, somehow captivating, or the geometry of his features interacting with each other. Either way, as an artist, Dave was fascinated, and Frank had inadvertently become his newest muse.

It was almost mathematical, in a way, he reflected, the way he approached his art. In a sense, he still took to the old artist's advice that reality can be deconstructed in the mind's eye into simpler shapes, making it easier to digest and reproduce on paper. He prefered this worldview because it made it easier to study the world around him. Perhaps the engineering side of his brain was never really at rest when he drew, but instead stretching and exercising itself while learning to work more graphically, picturing the world around him as interconnecting shapes and components that fit together almost like pieces of visual machinery.

Perhaps it was just that, then, that drew Dave towards Frank's face: that it was aesthetically pleasing on a mathematical level, and he was simply drawn to the angles and shapes which lay beneath the surface in his mind's eye. But deep down, Dave knew it was more than that. Part of him just relaxed in a way he hadn't in years when he ran his pen over the newly fabricated lines of ink denoting Frank's cheekbones, or eyebrows, or jawline, forming the structure and the shadows that rendered his features in three dimensions. It was almost as if, through that paper, he could run his hands along the curves and edges of Frank's face, feeling the dunes and valleys of his face, observing through touch the uncharted terrain of a new world before him. Like a potter running their hands through the thick clay to form ceramic into a vase, crafting Frank’s face on paper required a certain light touch, the dexterous pull of his pen in a careful trajectory outlining all the details that made Frank the intelligent, beautiful man that he was.

He turned over onto his left side, resting his right hand in front of his face. He wanted to hold onto the warm feeling that drawing Frank gave him. He placed his index finger lightly on the fabric of his pod, closed his eyes, and imagined for a moment that Frank was next to him. How wasn’t important; there was nowhere comfortable on Discovery wide enough for the two to lay next to each other, since the National Astronautics Administration hadn’t planned on carting two lovers all the way to Jupiter. But it made him feel warm, imagining Frank right there, making small talk with Dave until his lips grew too tired to form the words. Frank was beautiful, but Dave was too tired to keep his eyes open; instead, he would lightly stroke the side of his face, forming the outlines in his mind’s eye while reminding Frank of his caring presence. The warmth covered Dave’s body like a blanket, and his thoughts trailed off until the artificial night turned into sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the purple prose. I'm trying to get back into writing. Hope you still enjoyed ^v^!


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